The Anxiety of Age

The overwhelming question that arises from the 82nd Annual Academy Awards goes like this: what level of respect should we accord to an industry that finds a place onstage for Miley Cyrus, but not for Lauren Bacall? Cyrus, who wore a perfectly respectable bustier but had inadvertently forgotten to put anything over it, came on to present an award in the company of Amanda Seyfried, and, in so doing, fluffed her lines. “We’re both kinda nervous, it’s our first time.” So saying, she tried to corral Seyfried into the fluff, inviting her to share the pain, but Seyfried, wisely, was having none of it, and shied backward, as if to say, “Enough with the both, sister.” This was only one of many blips and stumbles in the presentation, as a number of presenters developed one of those halting, on-off relationships with the teleprompter that tend to bedevil the green, the flustered, the myopic, and the under-rehearsed.

And there, meanwhile, resplendent and omniscient, sat Ms. Bacall, long since blessed with a place among the gods, on the empyrean heights of movie history, yet consigned, for the purposes of Sunday night, with a lowly place in the stalls. When her name was announced, she stood and waved, like the Queen, and was pleased to note that her subjects rose to pay appropriate homage; but she was forbidden, nonetheless, to mount the sacred stairs, where Miley had gone before. It transpired that Bacall, Roger Corman, John Calley, and Gordon Willis were being denied the chance to shine on Oscar night, having accepted their honorary statuettes at the Governors Awards, way back on November 14th. Between them, they know quite a bit about filmmaking, and the lustre that it can bestow. Perhaps it was thought impolitic, or unwise, to showcase their collective works, in case too tasty a slice of “The Big Sleep,” or too gorgeous a memory of Willis’s cinematography on “Manhattan,” might make a film like “Precious,” a noisy affair to begin with, look about as subtle as a road-drill. Or maybe the producers of the show, acutely aware of a ratings decline in recent years, and all the more desperate, therefore, not to let slip the kinds of audience for whom advertisers thirst, had issued a gentle nostrum: Don’t listen to “Up.” Skip the aged. Hold the old.

This time-clash, among what was, what is right now, and what’s coming up fast, is always there on Oscar night, but yesterday evening it felt more pervasive than ever, and more compelling, in its way, than the face-off between James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, which had been thrashed into inanition over preceding weeks, and which felt definitively settled from the moment that “The Hurt Locker” picked up Best Original Screenplay. So many of the gags wielded by Steve Martin, especially, seemed designed to probe this generational discomfort: “Two young actresses who have no idea who we are,” was his description of Cyrus and Seyfried. To Zac Efron and Taylor Lautner (who looks more like a “Twilight” action figure than a verifiable human), Martin gave a specific warning: “Take a good look at us, guys: this is you in five years.” Nice, though not as devastating, in its mortal fretfulness, as the line that he fired off a few years ago, when he was the solo host. Pointing out Kate Hudson and her coevals, Martin said how refreshing it was to see so many young stars in attendance, adding, “It reminds me of my own death.”

Is every actor blighted by the same anxiety of age? The frost of fashion will, of course, nip half the hopefuls in the bud, and yet, as one scanned the arrivals last night, it was cheering to alight on some who would, one feels, have flourished at almost any point in the long seasons of Hollywood. Cameron Diaz is one (how Billy Wilder would have hastened to hire her, for that mix of the unearthly and the downright wicked), which makes it all the more lamentable that nobody, but nobody, is able to supply her with a screenplay that doesn’t stink. George Clooney is another, of course, but so, I happen to think, is his co-star from “Up in the Air,” Vera Farmiga, whose drawling smartness would have earned her an easy spot in “Stage Door,” with Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn. Last night she managed to keep that wit about her, despite losing out to Mo’nique, despite wearing something that was not so much a dress as a crimson fan-dance that had ambitions to become a dress, and despite—above all—having to stand next to other luminaries and churn out a sweet love-crush to expectant nominees. This was something I had not expected to find: a human granita machine.

What was going on? Farmiga, Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, Stanley Tucci, Forest Whitaker, and others, all of them asked to hold still, without so much as a podium to lean on, an envelope to finger, or a little gold man to squeeze, and hymn their respective friends. Even Oprah had to do it; needless to say, she did it with bullet-point briskness and efficacy, but still, it must the first time she has found herself in a lineup. It was like a Celebrity “Usual Suspects.” Again and again, throughout the show, the producers decided to make rich, famous people strike a pose, in tricky isolation, just long enough to bead their hairlines with imperceptible sweat. My guess is that the Academy could be hearing from a whole lot of lawyers over breakfast. Each of the ten nominees for Best Picture was touted by a lonely figure on a platform; Colin Firth did it for “An Education,” and he had already endured, poor fellow, the horror of the opening minutes, when he, Morgan Freeman, Carey Mulligan, and others had been paraded, for our delectation, under the pitiless lights. Given that Englishmen imbibe embarrassment with their mother’s milk (that, indeed, is precisely where the problem begins), and given that Firth is one of the most undilutedly English stars since Robert Donat, his aplomb, under the circumstances, was miraculous to behold.

For a dizzying instant, I thought that all ten of that initial group—nominated for their performances in leading roles—were about to whirr, grow fuzzy, and beam themselves off the bridge of the U.S.S. Kodak Theatre. I was hoping, in short, for a “Star Trek” moment. What became apparent, however, with dispiriting speed, was that this would not be science fiction’s night. Science, yes, for those who want to know how to defuse a trunkful of bombs or power their houses with balloons, and plenty of fiction, too, for those who dream of slaughtering Nazis or getting laid on the strength of their air-miles; but not science and fiction in the same package. “Avatar” slunk away with three minor prizes, and “District 9,” an exemplary piece of low-budget inventiveness, with none. Even “Star Trek” lost its two awards, for sound mixing and editing, to “The Hurt Locker,” although at least both of those were collected, back-to-back, by a frail and splendid figure with flowing ginger-blond tresses, milky complexion, and unplaceable accent, whose very presence gave comfort to connoisseurs of the extraterrestrial. (For the record, his name is Paul N. J. Ottoson, and he claims to come from Sweden. Yeah, right.)

And that was pretty much it, for fans of the unfathomably strange. You might have reckoned that a quick zip back through a hundred years of sci-fi, in tribute to “Avatar” and to all that it excitably portends, would have been in order, instead of which, for no known reason, we got a gaggle of clips from random horror movies, some of them so random that they weren’t even horror movies at all. (Mind you, it was prefaced by the funniest skit in the show, a neatly judged spoof of “Paranormal Activity,” starring Steve Martin and his co-presenter Alec Baldwin, which presumably cost more than the original film.) In the end, the only object on show that forced me to speculate on life beyond our solar system was the dress worn by Sarah Jessica Parker, a lemon sheath topped with what appeared to be ironwork. Label-hunters tagged it as Chanel, cynics dismissed it as a nasty collision between the world’s cleanest shower curtain and the radiator grille of a Mack truck, but to me it was clearly the lightweight battle-dress worn by Ma’ami the She-Monarch from the third planet on the left past Pandora, already colonized by James Cameron as he prepares for his next adventure.

Will he wince at last night’s snub, and grind his teeth in his dreams, or do two and a half billion dollars sit more comfortably in the hand than a few square inches of gold plate? I think he will mind, a little, precisely because an Oscar is still, pace Harvey Weinstein, something that money can’t buy—because Hollywood itself remains stubbornly hard to conquer, with or without your dragon and your magic braid. Tom Ford dropped a hint of this, as he spoke to Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet beforehand: truly a meeting of rare species. Ford explained that the purpose of life, as dramatized in his film, “A Single Man,” was “not about money, cars, things—I mean, all of us are fortunate in this world—but it’s really about your connection to other people.” Seacrest didn’t miss a beat. “Tell me about this suit,” he said. “It’s a Tom Ford suit,” Tom Ford said. Talk about connection.

Both men looked chilled, pert, and primed for the ordeal ahead, though surely the realization that it would last more than three and a half hours would have been enough to take the edge off that chill. Did they foresee the bad robot dance? The pause that enabled Kristen Stewart to turn aside from the microphone, though not aside enough, and cough in spluttery fear over her shoulder? The way in which Tom Hanks, a pro at this palaver, clocked the overrun, marched on, skipped the final countdown, undid the envelope, and pronounced the words “The Hurt Locker” as if slipping his wife some plain, though not unwelcome, news about the size of their grocery bill? The one thing that none of us could have predicted was that our hearts, and our film-going habits of yore, should be stirred by a montage of old John Hughes movies. All of a sudden, folded and pasted together, as if in a yearbook or a photograph album, the clippings didn’t look dated, or tacky, or constrained by their setting. They looked like an authentic portrait of American teen-age yearning, both raucous and shy: “My God, are we going to be like our parents?” Emilio Estevez asked, in a line from “The Breakfast Club.” The question reverberated around the auditorium last night more searchingly than ever, as parent and grandparents, the elders and betters of their profession, gazed kindly, and with boundless apprehension, upon the next wave of kids. It seems impossible that Kate Winslet’s hair, the most beautiful arrangement since the heyday of Veronica Lake, could ever be outgleamed, and outbrushed, by other locks; but even perfect beauty, as Yeats was sorry to inform us, will grow old and gray and full of sleep. Just look at Antonio Banderas’s beard.

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”